Machine learning. Artificial Intelligence

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Big Analytics Roundup (May 23, 2016)

Google announces that it has designed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) expressly for deep neural nets. Tech press goes bananas. The chips, branded Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) require fewer transistors per operation, so Google can fit more operations per second into the chip. In about a year of operation, Google has achieved an order of magnitude improvement in performance per watt for machine learning.

Google’s Felipe Hoffa summarizes Mark Litwintschik’s work benchmarking different platforms with the New York City Taxi and Limo Commission’s public dataset of 1.1 billion trips. So far, Mark has tested PostgreSQL on AWS, ElasticSearch on AWS, Spark on AWS EMR, Redshift, Google BigQuery, Presto on AWS and Presto on Cloud Dataproc. Results make Google look good, but you should read Mark’s original posts.

— TIBCO announces something called Accelerator for Apache Spark, a bundle of tools that connect TIBCO products with open source packages. While TIBCO refers to this component as open source, the software is available only to TIBCO customers, which means it isn’t Free and Open Source.